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      AOC calls the US Green party ‘not serious’ – can it be more than a ‘spoiler’ in the election?

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      American politics often has wild deviations from the norms of other major democracies and one of the most striking differences is set to be on display in this year’s election – the performance of its domestic Green party.There are elected Greens at the national level in the UK, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany and Australia, sometimes helping form governments, and yet the US Green party has only ever had a handful of state-level representatives (it currently has none) and has never had a federal election winner.Of about 500,000 elected positions in the US, from school boards and township supervisors to the presidency, the Green party holds just 149. There’s little indication there will be an influx of left-leaning Greens in November’s elections, which will include local and state polls, as well as the headline presidential race in which Jill Stein is the party’s nominee for a third time.“It’s been a story of complete failure,” said Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia who argued the most consequential Green party impact has been as “spoilers” helping Republicans in close elections, such as Ralph Nader’s campaign in 2000 and Stein’s in 2016. There’s a small chance such a scenario could play out again in this year’s tight contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. One poll this month had Stein leading Harris among Muslim-American voters in three key swing states of Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin, Middle East Eye reported.“Normally the Greens aren’t important but they were in 2016, they cost Hillary Clinton a couple of blue wall states, and they were in 2000,” Sabato said. “Why vote for them when Democrats are also concerned about climate change? All you’re doing is helping Republicans. Without them we might not have had the Iraq invasion, we might not have had Donald Trump.”Others are more sympathetic, pointing to the winner-takes-all nature of US politics and the well-funded machinery of the two-party system that makes it hard for third parties, including the Green party and the Libertarian party, to break through. Notably, however, the UK’s Green party did win four seats in first-past-the-post Westminster elections in July.“It is difficult for small parties to make way in the United States because of the undemocratic electoral system,” said Christine Milne, former leader of the Australian Greens, which was in coalition with the ruling center-left Labor party between 2010 and 2013.“Proportional representation systems provide opportunities for small parties to be elected which has been key to the growth of the Greens around the world.”Under Stein, the US Green party has complained of a duopoly but aimed most of its attacks at Democrats, accusing the party of supporting a genocide in Gaza and holding rallies with signs reading “Abandon Harris”.“The simple fact is there is very little policy daylight between these two candidates,” Stein said following last week’s debate between Trump and Harris. Stein added that Harris “chooses the softer approach to fascism of capitulating to endless war and corporate rule in exchange for half a billion in campaign contributions.“What we saw on Tuesday [last week] were two candidates striving to outbid the other’s promises to push us towards a new world war and accelerate the climate emergency.”Such a stance has dismayed some who sought to build the Green party as an alternative to the two major parties. “To me this election is the choice between fascism and keeping democracy alive so it’s almost unfathomable to me that people can think the parties are the same,” said Ted Glick, a progressive activist who was a long-standing Green party member and ran as a Senate candidate for the party in New Jersey.“It’s scary to see so many people support Donald Trump and it’s hard to understand how someone as smart as Jill Stein can think this guy is the same as Kamala Harris.”Glick said he left the Green party in 2017 after becoming convinced the party needed to grow its base between presidential elections by focusing on states that are ‘safe’ for either of the two major parties, rather than battleground states. He said he was “shocked” when Stein said those who sought alliances with other progressives and independents, such as Bernie Sanders, were “sheepdogs for the duopoly”.“Bernie Sanders’s campaign more than anything else points the way to how we get strong, progressive alternatives in the US,” Glick said.“But the Green party became very narrow and rigid, a tiny party of true believers focused on ideological purity above all else. Back in 2004 there were 225 Green party members in elected office, now it’s 143 (the Green party has said it is 149). It’s a pretty dismal record for 20 years of existence.”Rather than ally with the Democratic left wing, Stein has instead been involved in a recent battle with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive Democratic congresswoman from New York. “All you do is show up once every four years to speak to people who are justifiably pissed off, but you’re just showing up once every four years to do that, you’re not serious,” Ocasio-Cortez posted on Instagram last month. “To me, it does not read as authentic. It reads as predatory.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStein has responded by accusing Ocasio-Cortez of supporting genocide in Gaza and for “taking” a Green party policy in the Green New Deal, a resolution supported by some Democrats, formerly including Harris, for a massive investment in clean energy, jobs and healthcare. “Maybe it’s time to watch these parties die,” Stein, a doctor who has run for president in 2012, 2016 and now 2024, posted on X.This approach, as well as a comparative lack of focus on environmental issues – the US Green party has attacked the Inflation Reduction Act, a huge climate bill with elements of the Green New Deal that was passed by Democrats in 2022, as “relatively small” and a “tradeoff” with fossil fuel interests – and opposition to Nato is unusual among overseas counterparts.“The US Green party is attempting to go after the subset of voters on the left who don’t like the Democrats,” said Carl Roberts, a spokesperson at the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, affiliated with a German Green party that has been in the German federal parliament consistently since 1983 and currently supplies the country’s vice-chancellor and foreign minister.“I think this is quite out of step with other Green parties, who always center environmental concerns in their messaging and campaigns as one of their highest priorities,” Roberts said, adding, however, that “systemic” issues with the US political landscape are largely the cause of this difference.A US Green party spokesperson said the party had been “dismayed” by European Green parties’ “silence and complicity” over Israel and Gaza and that these parties have “relied too much on US corporate news media and seem to have swallowed falsehoods like the belief that Republicans are right and Democrats are left”.Democrats and Republicans do differ on climate, he said, but the Biden administration has taken “modest and inadequate measures” to deal with the crisis and it is “reckless and irresponsible to allow an expansion of drilling in the midst of a worsening global climate emergency”.“When Greens get elected to Congress some day, they’ll work with progressives like AOC and others on shared legislative agenda,” the spokesperson said. “The Green party didn’t pick an election-year fight with AOC, the reverse is what happened.”He added the solution to “spoiler” allegations would be ranked-choice voting, which has been mostly opposed by the main two parties.So, will Stein prove a factor in this November’s election? The Green party candidate, running with Butch Ware, is not on the ballot in around a dozen states and is polling at around 1% of the vote, a small but potentially significant total should certain swing states have razor-thin margins.“I doubt they will have an impact but nobody expected Jill Stein to do what she did in 2016, or for Trump to win,” said Sabato. “It was a perfect storm, and the storm is still raging.”Glick hopes his former party isn’t decisive in November. “Hopefully there will be a major drop off in their support when it comes to pulling the lever and preventing Trump getting back into office,” he said. “I hope they see the error of their ways. We need progressive alternative to the Democrats and Republicans, but this isn’t the way you do it.” More

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      The American right is inciting a pogrom against Haitian immigrants in Ohio | Moira Donegan

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      Does it even matter that the Haitian immigrants who have flocked to Springfield, Ohio, are in the country legally? Does it matter that Springfield, once a depressed post-industrial Rust belt town like so many others, has been economically revitalized by their arrival? Does it matter that the immigrants from Haiti fled violence and economic deprivation in their own country that are the outcome of American policy? Does it matter that none of the bizarre lies that have been peddled about them by Donald Trump, JD Vance and others on the right, telling lurid tales of the migrants capturing and killing local pets, are true?But even though the stories are made up, the threats now facing Springfield’s population of roughly 80,000 souls are very real. After last week’s presidential debate, when Trump railed about how Haitians in Springfield were “eating the dogs, eating the cats … they’re eating the pets of the people that live there”, life has been transformed in Springfield. Ordinary life has yielded to a barrage of media attention, nationally broadcast lies and threats.Two elementary schools in Springfield had to be evacuated because of threats of violence. Think about that: someone contacted Springfield authorities and made threats against grade-school children that were credible enough that the buildings had to be evacuated for the sake of safety. Classes at Wittenberg University in Springfield had to be held online because multiple threats of violence targeting Haitian students and staff there – including a bomb threat and a mass shooting threat – were deemed credible. Two hospitals in the town, Kettering Health Springfield and Mercy Health, had to go into lockdown after receiving threats. Government buildings in the city also had to be closed.Haitian immigrants in Springfield told news outlets that they were afraid to leave their homes. There were reports of broken windows and acid thrown on cars. There is a word for this kind of large-scale, organized violence against a local ethnic enclave. That word is pogrom.There was a time, earlier in Trump’s political career, when pundits liked to issue chin-scratching missives about the mutability of truth: about how Trump could spin outright fabrications into vehicles for white or male grievance, and about how shockingly little it mattered when his stories were revealed to be lies. Now, the thoroughly Trumpified Republican party has all but dispensed with the pretext of honesty, instead embracing an avowed sense that the factual truth is actually irrelevant.In an interview with CNN, Vance, who was instrumental in amplifying the lies about Springfield’s Haitian population, seemed to concede that he knew the stories of immigrants eating pets were false. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” the vice-presidential candidate said. The suffering of the people of Springfield, apparently, is not his concern.The episode is typical of Trump’s cynical cycle, one which the rightwing media and his many Republican imitators have almost perfected over the course of the past decade: an outrageous lie is told that provides cover for a racist resentment among Trump’s supporters – and, more importantly, gins up attention for Trump himself. Because the lie is fabricated and because it has no basis in reality, it can exist entirely at the level of fantasy and projection: lurid tales of pet-eating are not true, but because they can’t be proven or disproven, they can propel days’ worth of imaginings, condemnations, hoaxes and frantic factchecking by the media class. That this particular lie evokes longstanding racist imaginations of Black people as brutal and bestial – something more akin to coyotes than to hardworking small-town families – it reaffirms Trump’s particular appeal to the white Republican id. Trump, meanwhile, uses this vulgarity to monopolize the news cycle. Real people pay the price somewhere off camera, while he repeats his libels into a microphone.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThose microphones may be part of the point. One of the great lessons of the past month, as Kamala Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket and took on a more mocking and dismissive approach to Trump and his brand of politics, is that Trump’s entertainment value is a bit like Samson’s hair. When Trump is not getting attention – be it negative, outraged, adulatory or prurient – he is desperate, useless, like a fish out of water. The debate last week was a disaster for Trump: he was belittled, humiliated, made to seem peevish, petty, pathetic and incompetent by the woman who now leads him in most polls.But this blood libel against a small migrant community in the midwest has turned the attention back to him. That may be all he really wants. Trump’s theory of politics, after all, has always been wildly consistent: he only feels like he’s winning when everyone is looking his way.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      ‘Only consequential presidents get shot at,’ Trump tells event – US politics live

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      Donald Trump touched on a range of topics during his town hall with Sarah Huckabee Sanders, that included – according to The Hill – the fate of the US auto industry, climate change (which he mocked) and a rejection of the ‘rambling’ label he’s been given by Kamala Harris.The Hill reports that, after giving a long and winding answer on Tuesday during which Trump spoke about the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, appeared to confuse Bagram airbase with an oil reserve in Alaska and threatened to impose a 200% tariff on cars imported from Mexico, the Republican presidental nominee argued his words were more “productive” than what Harris says on the campaign trail.“The fake news likes to say, ‘Oh he was rambling.’ No, no. That’s not rambling. That’s genius,” Trump said of his own comments. “When you can connect the dots. Now, Sarah, if you couldn’t connect the dots, you got a problem. But every dot was connected. And many stories were told in that little paragraph.”Trump also mocked climate change. According to The Hill, Trump said that the biggest threat to the public was not climate change but nuclear warfare.“Not that the ocean is going to rise in 400 years an eighth of an inch, and you’ll have more seafront property if that happens,” Trump said. “I said, ‘Is that good or bad?’ I said, isn’t that a good thing if I have a little property on the ocean? I have a little bit more property, I have a little bit more ocean.”Donald Trump held his first campaign event on Tuesday since the thwarted assassination attempt over the weekend, telling a packed 6,000-seat arena in Flint, Michigan that the assassin “couldn’t even get a shot off” while describing the Secret Service’s “great” response to the threat.During a town hall moderated by former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump took audience questions about manufacturing and the economy, among other issues. Like his first appearance after the attempt on his life in July – also a rally in Michigan – Trump appeared ready to return to business as usual on the campaign trail, and his supporters were eager to see him in action.Susan Moore and Christopher Moore, who came to the rally from Mundy Township, Michigan, got in line at 9.30am for a chance to get inside their first Trump event, where doors didn’t open until 3pm. “The atmosphere is just electric,” Susan Moore said.Clark Grognan, a career auto worker from Whiteford, Michigan, said Bill Clinton’s “horrible” presidency convinced him to vote Republican, and that it was “exciting” to meet so many like-minded people.“God is not done with President Trump,” Huckabee Sanders said as she opened the event, calling Trump “what our country desperately needs”.Auto workers were among the most common attendees. Several people wore “Unions for Trump” merchandise, and some had UAW T-shirts.Flint, like much of Michigan’s east side, has been a bastion of the US auto industry. Trump began the night by lamenting the rise of Mexican car manufacturing. He championed new tariffs, saying about Mexico: “We’re not going to let them sell one car in the USA.”You can read the full piece here:Good morning and welcome to our coverage of the run-up to the US presidential election.The fallout from Sunday’s apparent assassination attempt on Republican nominee Donald Trump is continuing. Last night the former president made his first public appearance since the incident, which occurred while he was playing golf in Florida.“It’s been a great experience,” the Republican presidential nominee said in an evening town hall in Flint, Michigan, about holding events with thousands of supporters. But he also went on to call running for president “a dangerous business” akin to car racing or bull riding.“Only consequential presidents get shot at,” he said.The crowd chanted “God bless Trump!” and “fight, fight, fight” as US Secret Service agents surrounded the stage to protect him.Sunday’s incident, for which a suspect has been charged with possession of a firearm as a felon, comes two months after Trump was lightly injured when a gunman opened fire on him at a Pennsylvania rally.In other developments:

      On Tuesday, Kamala Harris was interviewed by a panel of three National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) members, during which the vice-president talked about the anti-immigrant sentiment toward Haitians in Springfield, Ohio; Israel’s war in Gaza; domestic economic issues; gun violence; and reproductive rights. The conversation was one of the few interviews Harris has done since becoming the Democratic nominee.

      JD Vance defended his comments about Haitian immigrants eating pets during a Tuesday rally, saying that “the media has a responsibility to factcheck” stories – not him. The rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, came two days after the Ohio senator told CNN host Dana Bash it was OK “to create stories” to draw attention to issues his constituents care about, regarding inflammatory and unfounded claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, had eaten residents’ pets.

      The FBI and the US Postal Inspection Service on Tuesday were investigating the origin of suspicious packages that have been sent to or received by elections officials in more than 15 states, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or that any of the packages contained hazardous material. The latest packages were sent to elections officials in Alaska, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York and Rhode Island.

      Donald Trump is planning to appear with Polish President Andrzej Duda in the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Sunday, according to two sources familiar with the plan, reports Reuters. The dual appearance is not yet finalised, said one of the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss plans that are still private. But if the dual appearance goes forward, it would mark a rare instance of a foreign leader appearing alongside a US presidential candidate on the campaign trail.

      A false claim circulating on social media that Kamala Harris was involved in an alleged hit-and-run in San Francisco in 2011 is the work of a covert Russian disinformation operation, according to new research by Microsoft. The Russian group responsible, which Microsoft dubs Storm-1516, is described as a Kremlin-aligned troll farm.

      America Pac, one of the largest and the most ambitious of the groups supporting Donald Trump’s campaign, is replacing its voter turnout operations in the crucial battleground states of Arizona and Nevada, according to two people familiar with the matter. The political action committee, backed by billionaire Elon Musk, has ended its contract with the September Group and will hire a new company to knock on doors with fewer than 50 days left until the election. More

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      US still unprepared for Russian election interference, Robert Mueller says

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      The US is still not prepared for inevitable Russian attacks on its elections, the former special counsel Robert Mueller, who investigated Russian interference in 2016 and links between Donald Trump and Moscow, warns in a new book.“It is … evident that Americans have not learned the lessons of Russia’s attack on our democracy in 2016,” Mueller writes in a preface to Interference: The Inside Story of Trump, Russia and the Mueller Investigation by Aaron Zebley, James Quarles and Andrew Goldstein, prosecutors who worked for Mueller from 2017 to 2019.Mueller continues: “As we detailed in our report, the evidence was clear that the Russian government engaged in multiple, systematic attacks designed to undermine our democracy and favor one candidate over the other.”That candidate was Trump, the Republican who beat the Democrat, Hillary Clinton, for the White House.“We were not prepared then,” Mueller writes, “and, despite many efforts of dedicated people across the government, we are not prepared now. This threat deserves the attention of every American. Russia attacked us before and will do so again.”Interference will be published in the US next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Zebley, Quarles and Goldstein tell the story of the Mueller investigation, from its beginnings in May 2017 after Trump fired the FBI director, James Comey, to its conclusion in March 2019 with moves by William Barr, Trump’s second attorney general, to obscure and dismiss Mueller’s findings.Mueller did not establish collusion between Trump and Moscow but did initiate criminal proceedings against three Russian entities and 34 people, with those convicted including a Trump campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who was jailed. Mueller also laid out 10 instances of possible obstruction of justice by Trump. Though he did not indict Trump, citing justice department policy regarding sitting presidents, Mueller said he was not clearing him either.Mueller now says Zebley, Quarles and Goldstein “care deeply about the rule of law and know the importance of making decisions with integrity and humility”, adding: “These qualities matter most when some refuse to play by the rules, and others are urging you to respond in kind.”View image in fullscreenThe FBI director from 2001 to 2013, Mueller was 72 and widely admired for his rectitude when he was made special counsel. His former prosecutors describe a White House meeting preceding that appointment. In an atmosphere of high tension, Mueller made his entry “via a warren of passages beneath the Eisenhower Executive Office Building”, thereby avoiding the press. Trump, who wanted Mueller to return as FBI director, “did most of the talking” but though he praised Mueller richly, Mueller declined the offer. As the authors write, Trump “would later claim that Bob came to the meeting asking to be FBI director”, and that Trump “turned him down”.“This was false,” the prosecutors write.Soon after the White House interview, the New York Times reported memos kept by Comey about Trump’s request to shut down an investigation of Michael Flynn, the national security adviser who resigned after lying about contacts with the Russian ambassador. Soon after that, Mueller was appointed special counsel.Trump escaped punishment arising from Mueller’s work but did lose the White House in 2020, when he was beaten by Joe Biden. Zebley, Quarles and Goldstein’s book arrives as another election looms, with Trump in a tight race with the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and shortly after US authorities outlined how pro-Trump influencers were paid large sums by Russia. On Tuesday, a new threat intelligence report from Microsoft said Russia was accelerating covert influence efforts against Harris.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUS presidential elections are often the subject of “October surprises”, late-breaking scandals which can tilt a race. In 2016, October brought both Trump’s Access Hollywood scandal, in which he was recorded bragging about sexual assault, and the release by WikiLeaks of Democratic emails hacked by Russia.In Interference, Zebley, Quarles and Goldstein tell how the Mueller team came to its conclusion that Russia boosted Trump in 2016. They also detail attempts to interview Trump that were blocked by his attorneys, Rudy Giuliani among them. Describing how the former New York mayor betrayed a promise to keep an April 2018 meeting confidential, speaking openly if inaccurately to the press, the authors say Mueller “decided he would never again meet or speak with Giuliani – and he never did. For Bob it was a matter of trust.”More than six years on, Giuliani faces criminal charges arising from his work to overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat, as well as costly civil proceedings. Trump also faces civil penalties and criminal charges, having been convicted on 34 counts in New York over hush-money payments made before the 2016 election.Though Zebley, Quarles and Goldstein focus on the Russia investigation, in doing so they voice dismay regarding the US supreme court, to which Trump appointed three rightwing justices and which has this year twice cast his criminal cases into doubt.The authors describe how Mueller’s team decided not to subpoena Trump for in-person testimony, given delays one Trump attorney said would result from inevitable “war” on the matter. Looking ahead, the authors consider new supreme court opinions that will shape such face-offs in future.Fischer v United States, the authors say, narrows the scope of the obstruction of justice statute “that was the focus of volume II of our report”. More dramatically, in Trump v United States, the court held “that a president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution when carrying out ‘core’ constitutional functions … and has ‘presumptive’ immunity for all ‘official actions’”.Though the court ruled a president was not immune for “unofficial actions”, Zebley, Quarles and Goldstein warn that it nonetheless “sharply limited the areas of presidential conduct that can be subject to criminal investigation – permitting a president to use his or her power in wholly corrupt ways without the possibility of prosecution”. More

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      Trump-allied Pac fires canvassing vendor in crucial states weeks before election

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      America Pac, one of the largest and the most ambitious of the groups supporting Donald Trump’s campaign, is replacing its voter turnout operations in the crucial battleground states of Arizona and Nevada, according to two people familiar with the matter.The political action committee, backed by billionaire Elon Musk, has ended its contract with the September Group and will hire a new company to knock on doors with fewer than 50 days left until the election.America Pac used non-performance as the stated reason to back out of the contract in the past few days, claiming the September Group was not hitting its door-knocking targets, one of people said.The shakeup comes at a crunch moment for the Trump campaign, which has outsourced virtually its entire ground game operation to a number of political action committees in this presidential cycle. America Pac is seen as the most ambitious, with a presence in every swing state.As a result of the shakeup, America Pac has not canvassed any neighborhoods in Arizona and Nevada on behalf of the Trump campaign for the past few days as it resets its operations in the two states.America Pac hopes the roughly 300 canvassers employed by the September Group will be rehired by its successor but whether that occurs remains uncertain.To some degree, it would be in America Pac’s interest to rehire the people given the talent pool for knocking on doors in the blazing Arizona and Nevada heat is dramatically reduced this late in the cycle, having already been hired by congressional and other campaigns.The New York Times reported earlier that America Pac would replace the September Group with a new canvassing vendor. The September Group was paid just under $1.4m for its work since August, according to federal election commission filings.A Trump campaign spokesperson could not immediately be reached for comment.The move inside America Pac comes as Republican officials in swing states have raised concern about the Trump campaign’s own formal presence for the get-out-the-vote operation, the Guardian has reported.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Republican National Committee once envisioned an extensive field operation for the 2024 election, until the Trump campaign scrapped those plans when it took over the party in March, pursuing a twin voter turnout strategy of relying on Pacs and ardent Trump volunteers.The Trump campaign took the gamble to outsource its ground game, after the Federal Election Commission gave permission for campaigns to coordinate their voter turnout efforts with the Pacs, freeing Trump to spend his war chest on rallies and television advertising.But the Pacs, which are supposed to bridge the gap, have been slow to spool up, according to people with direct access to the data for groups such as America Pac, Turnout for America, Turning Point Action and America First Works.They have only started to hire at a rapid clip in recent weeks, the people said, meaning they are reaching Trump supporters late in the cycle when it often takes repeated “voter contacts” to get them to return a ballot.The situation means that not only is the size of the formal Trump operation particularly small for the 2024 election, but the door-knockers and canvassers recruited by the Pacs might be less effective compared with previous presidential cycles. More

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      Stars come out in Atlanta to celebrate Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday

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      Former president Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday is on 1 October. His supporters didn’t want to wait that long to throw a party.A parade of Georgia luminaries on Tuesday lit up the venerable Fox Theater on Peachtree Street. In a city that boasts new, swanky modern glass and steel venues like the Cobb Energy performing arts center or the Eastern befitting the city’s rising prominence, organizers chose Atlanta’s oldest concert hall to celebrate Carter’s centennial.Jimmy Carter is four years older than the Fox Theater.“Not everyone gets 100 years,” said Jason Carter, the former president’s grandson and 2014 nominee for governor of Georgia. “But when someone does and uses that time to good, it’s worth celebrating.”View image in fullscreenThe event was almost entirely devoid of maudlin sentiment. Video testimonials by Jon Stewart, Bob Dylan and others, were splashed across a screen, interspersed by images of famous musicians of the period visiting the White House.Every living president except Trump sent a message of congratulations and well-wishing.Headliners included five-time Grammy award winner Angélique Kidjo of Benin, BeBe Winans and Carlene Carter – no relation to the former president.Carter, a Democrat, was president of the United States from 1977 to 1981, and is the longest-lived US president. He was awarded the 2002 Nobel peace prize for what the committee said was “his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development”.“When my mother, June Carter, and her husband, Johnny Cash, went to visit him at the White House, I was pretty jealous, as I thought so highly of him even back then,” said Carlene Carter, 68. “Both he and June had suggested more than once that we were, in fact, kin, and the fact that both he and mom had that Carter ‘sparkle’ makes me think that they were related. When Jimmy Carter was our president, it was evident to me that he only wanted the best for our country and for all humankind. I look at him as a very special, spiritual soul, so when people ask if we’re related, I always respond, ‘I hope so.’”View image in fullscreenIn his video message, Stewart said: “He has these ideals, and he executes them. Personally.“It’s a lesson in living your life with intention.”Dave Matthews in a happy birthday message played on the screen, said: “You were definitely the first rock’n’roll president.”With the choice of The Road Home in the first refrain by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s choral performance, presenters quietly acknowledged the heartbreak usually avoided in polite conversation around here: that the end of Carter’s life is imminent.View image in fullscreenCarter is in hospice care at home in Plains, Georgia, and has been since February 2023, 578 days ago. A National Institutes of Health analysis noted that the average stay in hospice is about 17 days. Carter’s wife of 77 years, Rosalynn, died last year after a few days in hospice.Last month, he told his grandson Jason Carter, “I’m only trying to make it to vote for Kamala.”“As I’m sure you know, my grandfather wishes he could be here tonight,” Jason Carter said on Tuesday. Georgia Public Broadcasting plans to play the concert on Jimmy Carter’s birthday in a couple of weeks. “I will guarantee to you that he will be in front of the TV, watching,” the younger Carter said.View image in fullscreenMany of the performing artists, including rock group Drive-By Truckers, Allman Brothers member Chuck Leavell, and The B-52s have Georgia ties.The B-52s formed in Athens, Georgia, while Carter was campaigning for president in 1976. He was 52. Vocalist Fred Schneider was 25. The B-52s held their farewell concert last January at the Fox.View image in fullscreenThe event raised money for the Carter Center in Atlanta, which promotes health and advocates for democracy around the world.Most recently, the Carter Center, in conjunction with other advocacy organizations for international democracy, released a set of models for genuine elections – a set of specific steps that government leaders and democracy advocates can take to help strengthen democracy.Jimmy Carter founded the Carter Center 42 years ago. More

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      JD Vance defends pet-eating remarks: ‘The media has a responsibility to fact-check’

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      JD Vance defended his comments about Haitian immigrants eating pets during a Tuesday rally, saying that “the media has a responsibility to fact-check” stories – not him.The rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, came two days after the Ohio senator told CNN host Dana Bash it was OK “to create stories” to draw attention to issues his constituents care about, regarding inflammatory and unfounded claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, had eaten residents’ pets.The comments, in which he appeared to say that politicians can brazenly lie, drew immediate rebuke. But during his rally, Vance defended them and claimed that numerous constituents had told him “they’d seen something in Springfield”.“On top of it, if there are certain people who refuse to listen to them, who refuse to take their concerns seriously,” he said, “that’s when it’s my job as United States senator to listen to my constituents.”Vance took questions from reporters but knocked the press repeatedly, a line of attack that brought the crowd to their feet.“When I said – and the media always does this, they’re very dishonest – when I say that I created a story, I’m talking about the media story, by focusing the press’s intention on what’s going on in Springfield,” said Vance.During his speech to a crowd of several hundred people, Vance spoke at length about immigration, invoking a crime committed by an undocumented person in the town of Prairie du Chien that Republicans in the state have already seized on to bolster Republican claims about immigrants committing violent crimes. In fact, research shows immigrants do not commit crimes at a higher rate than people born in the US.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Every community is a border state,” said Vance. “The problems that Kamala Harris has imported through that American southern border have now gone nationwide.”He also blamed the vice-president for the recent apparent assassination attempt at Mar-a-Lago.“The American media, the Democrats, the Kamala Harris campaign, they’ve gotta cut this crap out or they’re gonna get somebody killed,” said Vance, alleging that Democrats, who have highlighted Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric and attempts to overturn the 2020 election, are to blame for the two apparent assassination attempts that Trump has faced so far during his 2024 campaign.Vance described a chaotic, dark, and violent vision of the US under a Harris presidency.“We are closer, in this moment, to a nuclear war, or a third world war, than at any time in our country’s history and we have the chaos and incompetence of Kamala Harris to thank for it,” the Republican vice-presidential nominee said during a campaign event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.Vance’s message, especially on immigration, was well-received by the crowd.“You don’t know who’s coming across that border. You don’t know the violence or the background of those people,” said Victoria Bischel, who owns a farm and a real estate business and appreciated Vance’s comments. “I believe in immigration. I believe in legal immigration […] I don’t hop over the fence to Saudi Arabia and decide that I want to live there.” More